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Nightmare on Skype street, or Skype on old computer

Hi folks

We often install Skype on our relatives’ computers and educate them how to call us and respond to our calls.

One of my 80 years old relative had Skype configured and it suddenly stopped to work a while ago.

The PC is 15 years old and has Windows XP on it.

If only I had TeamViewer running there, I might look at the problem, but it is extremely difficult to explain someone 80 years old how…

JavaScript propertyChanging, propertyChanged, propertyGetting events

Hi folks

A while ago I described how to debug native DOM element changes.

I needed to use it more often and that became too annoying to write all that boilerplate code over and over.

I decided to implement an event-driven helper. For setter I create propertyChanging, propertyChanged and propertyGetting events. You can just subscribe to an appropriate one and put any conditional logic in the event…

WTF! MicrosoftAjax.js vs ‘use strict’ vs Firefox vs IE

Hi folks

I fixed a very weird bug today.

Initially the bug was raised that some actions causes JavaScript error in Firefox:

TypeError: access to strict mode caller function is censored

This was not happening in IE or Chrome.

I started to debug and found that the problem is within MicrosoftAjax framework. I am working on a legacy ASP.NET WebForms project which uses and relies on it heavily.

Fo…

‘Broken phone screen’ or ‘99% success = fail’

Hi folks

I’d like to share my fail story I’ve got yesterday.

Preamble (you may skip it)

I am using Nexus 5 smartphone for 2 years already and I like it very much.

I’ve already replaced its screen three times.

First time, I replaced it in 1.5 years ago after my first 1.5 years old son dropped it on tiles in bathroom and the screen cracked.

Second time, I replaced it 4 months ago after my second 6…

Best programming font – Source Code Pro

Hi folks

Recently, I reinstalled my Windows and started to reconfigure my environment to use font I am using for last 5 years – Consolas

I decided to search what is the most popular font nowadays and found http://www.slant.co/topics/67/~programming-fonts where Consolas is quite popular – 249 upvotes. But I found another winner Source Code Pro with 362 upvotes.

So I decided to give it a chance.

I…

Funny ‘Lorem ipsum’ memories

Hey folks

I remember the first time I found ‘Lorem ipsum’ in our codebase. I was working for the Netherlands company so I thought it is something like ‘Hello World’ in Dutch :)

I only realized its real meaning when I found the same words at my next job’s codebase.

Funny mistake, isn’t it?

Stay tuned

Hey folks

I’ve just encountered a funny error

I tried to run my virtual machine from VirtualBox and got

I tried to reopen VirtualBox a few times but issue persisted.

I didn’t run anything memory intensive.

Then I open Task Manager and see

Oh wow. Looking into Sublime

Ah! That’s it. I accidentally pressed F4 in Total Commander so the file was opening in editor and eating my memory.

A gotcha…

‘One long debug story’ or ‘checkbox.onclick’

Hey folks

I spent another working day debugging something simple

I work on a legacy project which has many approaches that are discouraged nowadays.

The problem I tried to solve was around checkboxes. The very simplified version of the code looks like

<input id="abc" type="checkbox" onclick="someWeirdLogic()">

function someWeirdLogic() { var str = makeSynchronousAjaxPostback(); // don't ask…

How to debug JavaScript to find code which modifies your DOM

Hey folks

Sometimes, especially on legacy projects, it’s too difficult to find what code modified your DOM control.

I had such situation recently. I spent almost 5 hours trying to find where some malformed value was coming from.

To simulate the problem, please follow https://output.jsbin.com/wufimi. It has an input and a button. Some bad value is being set to the input value when you take mouse…

Perfectionist’s hell or SQL formatting

Hi folks

As a programmer-perfectionist I have a habit which is killing me.

Every time I need to add some script to SQL file, I am formatting it manually.

I would like to get a tool which would format SQL for me but everything I’ve tried has some flaws.

I tried online formatters, stand-alone tools and SQL Server Management Studio plugins. I am wasting so much time to configure them but still…

jQuery BlockUI and iframe vs require.js

Hi folks

We are using jQuery BlockUI plugin to indicate long-running operations.

progress-indicator.js

(function script() { "use strict"; define(["jquery", "jquery.blockUI"], function module($) { function showProgressIndicator() { $.blockUI(); } return { showProgressIndicator: showProgressIndicator }; }); })();

MSBuild custom task and assembly locks

Hi folks

Sometimes you may want to perform some operations during build which are impossible or at least too difficult to perform using vanilla MSBuild.

For that purpose you may want to use custom task.

The simplest usage would look like

<UsingTask TaskName="MyCoolAssembly.MyCoolTask" AssemblyFile="MyCoolAssembly.dll" /> <Target Name="MyCoolTarget"> <MyCoolTask /> </Target>

It…

Hi folks

I’ve recently made a few fixes to different projects:

GitExtensions – https://github.com/gitextensions/gitextensions Many pull requests: https://github.com/gitextensions/gitextensions/pulls?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Apr+author%3Amnaoumov+ Some of them already merged, some of them still are not.

Monodevelop – https://github.com/mono/monodevelop/pulls?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Apr+author%3Amnaoumov+

require.js, jQuery and race conditions

Hi folks

I am working on one old legacy ASP.NET WebForms project. It had a lot of inline JavaScript rendered from server-side. Personally I think it is a very bad practice. I think the modern world tends to use static JavaScript files and unobtrusive markup.

I don’t see an easy way to refactor that quickly so I’m improving the code gradually.

I started to use require.jswith my new scripts and…

Hi folks

I found a bug in jQuery with IE8: https://github.com/jquery/jquery/issues/2350

Yes, I still have to support IE8 at work ;(

Stay tuned!

Execution of external commands (native applications) in PowerShell done right – Part 3

Part 1, Part 2

Hi folks

I realized that my previous implementation has a flaw. I though that exit code always 0..255 but this is the case only in DOS. In Windows it can be any signed 32-bit integer. So I had to fix it. You cannot create an array with all int values in PowerShell because of out-of-memory, so I had to take a switch approach.

function Invoke-NativeApplication { param ( [ScriptBlock]…